To Get Caught and to Be Hanged: Who Authors the Crime, the Death Penalty?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, in light of Kant’s defense of the death penalty. Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s equation of philosophy and the death penalty subtends this reading of Mailer and Kant. Kant’s rigorous distinction of inside and outside, as exemplified by his opposition between poena naturalis and poena forensis, submits to the movement of différance, whereby re-assuring distinctions of auto-punishment and hetero-punishment, criminal and judge, do not hold. The Executioner’s Song is a deconstructive reading, or re-writing, of Kant’s « On the Right to Punish and Grant Clemency ».